Scott's WeblogThe weblog of an IT pro focusing on cloud computing, Kubernetes, Linux, containers, and networking

Technology Short Take 81

Welcome to Technology Short Take #81! I have another collection of links, articles, and thoughts about key data center technologies, and hopefully I’ve managed to include something here that will prove useful or thought-provoking. Enjoy!

Jason Edelman also jumps into this discussion on the need for automation/programming/scripting skills with a post that advocates the position of “automate when you can, program when you must”. Jason’s position aligns well with the viewpoints of both Matt and Ivan. I must say—if three well-known networking professionals who are also skilled in automation are saying the same thing, you’d probably better pay attention.

Servers/Hardware

Intel NUC or SuperMicro E200-8D? Tai Ratcliff lays out his rationale for going with the latter for his home lab.

Security

Konstantin Ryabitsev has a series going on securing a SysAdmin Linux workstation. Part 1 covers how to choose a Linux distribution, and part 2 discusses some security tips for installing Linux on your SysAdmin workstation.

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

For those that may be new to Terraform, Cody Bunch has a great article that describes a simple use case of Terraform with vSphere. (Yes, folks, you can use “infrastructure as code” techniques and principles with vSphere!)

Project Harbor, an enterprise-class container registry, has really been seeing some uptake in the community. Check out this post for the latest update.

Red Hat discusses efforts around containerizing open-vm-tools to better support the use of Atomic OS instances running on VMware infrastructure. Also on the Red Hat front, they recently announced a container base image based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic. This means you can (potentially) use Atomic OS as the host OS as well as the base OS within containers on that host.

Storage

Brian Ragazzi shares a lesson learned the hard way regarding VVols: place the VSM/VASA on a non-VVol storage location.

The new storage startup Excelero—as described in this post by Chanaka Ekanayake (“Chan”)—certainly looks interesting. (As an aside, I do find it fascinating that new storage startups often emerge with support for Linux first, then add other operating systems afterward.)

Virtualization

If you’re not embracing automation in some form or fashion in your daily tasks, you’re not being as effective as you could be. This doesn’t necessarily mean writing code of some sort—Cody Bunch demonstrates how to use packer.io with vSphere to help automate building VM images.

William Lam throws out a teaser about a new project he’s been working on with Alan Renouf. This blog post provides a few scant details about the new project, called “USB to SDDC”.